


Key to the Kingdom

by penitence_road



Category: Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989)
Genre: Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide Treat, and cycles, stories about stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:19:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/pseuds/penitence_road
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can only repeat the same story for so long before someone decides to take matters into their own hands.    Camille decides that enough is enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Key to the Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovepeaceohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovepeaceohana/gifts).



> Whose very similar story I swear I didn't read until I was very nearly done with this one. Fortuitous Yule!

They say that there is a certain magic to numbers.

One, the prime, the first, the start of it all, a miracle, something from nothing.  (A boy with freckles and eyes the green of seawater, shy and silent and watchful.)

Two, the complement, the pair, the mirror.  (The first girl, the only girl, black-haired and gangly, endlessly imaginative.)

Three, three phases, three endings, three women, three brothers, three paths.  The story number, the fated number.  (Nemo.  Nemo had been third.)

And on and on.  Five had been brown as a nut and adventurous.  Eight had been bookish and passionate, the Professor’s favorite.  Thirteen had been a disaster; it had taken the king years to escape, and no one has seen the boy since. 

Perhaps there’s something magical about fourteen, though she can’t imagine what it might be.  Her father would say, “Well, my girl, if there’s magic in one number, there must be magic in them all.”

 _Zero,_ Camille thinks, applauding as the king reverently drapes the Golden Key around the latest boy’s neck, _the number of times I’ll watch this happen again._

 

* * *

 

 

Somewhere above in the darkness, a heavy door opens with a long groan that goes on and on, like a living thing in pain.  Voices drift down alongside it like pallbearers, and Camille’s hand tightens on the small box she carries.

“It’s so dark down here, Flip…  Are you sure it’s all right for us to be here?”

“It’s _fine,_ kid, how many times do I gotta tell ya?  They wouldn’t give you the key to the kingdom if they didn’t want you to explore it, and no one’s explored Slumberland more than little old moi."

“If you say so, Flip.”

Anger knots tight and compact in Camille’s belly.  The clown’s voice is cavalier, easily winding its way through the same old rhythms, and for as many times as she’s known him, she still can’t hear so much as one hitching syllable of weariness in his words.

Now their shadows leap and twist in the dungeon’s green half-light.  She eases back the clasp on the silver box and turns up the lid.  A spun-sugar sheep no longer than her tiniest knuckle sits on the powder blue cushion inside, its icing eyes applied with greatest care, a yellow ribbon as fine as embroidery floss tied around its neck by the pâtissier’s youngest apprentice, the only person in the kitchens with hands small enough for the task.  She scoops it into a cradle of two fingers and a thumb, breathing in and not back out.

Harald comes around the corner, blond hair gleaming, the key clasped tightly in his hand.  _Right over your heart,_ she thinks in one wracking moment of grief, _you liar; you’re a liar just like all the others.  How dare you think yourself fit?_

His mouth falls open when she steps forward, as does Flip’s, but she deafens her ears to them both and crosses the floor to the prince, taking his hand in hers and pushing the sheep past his lips right between “Your” and what would have been “Highness” but becomes “Hiaehhuhhh…” when he drops to the stone floor, fast asleep as the confection dissolves on his tongue.  She lifts her skirt, using one slippered foot to close his mouth, then reaches down and unwraps his hand from the key and pulls it from around his neck.  Onto her wrist it goes, cord looped thrice for good luck, and she straightens, tugging her cloak close with a twist of her hand so that her prize will be hidden in its folds. 

Flip stares at her as she turns to him, his eyes lead shot pellets in the gloom, set hard and round in his expressionless face.  She stares back, jutting out her chin.

“Finally through with it, huh?”  He thrusts his hands into his pockets, and nudges the fourteenth prince with one oversized shoe, not waiting for an answer.  “He probably woulda done all right, you know.”

“All right isn’t enough anymore.  Have you seen how much older the Professor looks?”

“Every time the old coot brings in a new kid,” he acknowledges.  “I got a few new gray hairs too, after the last one.  So what’re you gonna do with it?”  He takes a cigar out of his breast pocket, gesturing at her concealed arm.  “Something like that, it’s gonna take more than digging a hole in the ground or tossing it in the nearest lake.”

“That’s none of your business, and don’t smoke that filthy thing in here.” 

The clown shrugs and places the cigar firmly between his teeth.  Camille hesitates in the easy lapse into their mutual venom, watching as he looks down at Harald again and shakes his head.

 _Did he hope too?_ she wonders at the gleam of finality in Flip’s eyes.  _Every time we went through this?_

“Flip…” she says slowly, free hand fidgeting with her cloak.  “If you wanted, you could come with me.”

He barks out a laugh and turns to leave.  “Nothing doing, Princess!  I done _my_ time.  See you around in maybe another few hundred—”

“Stop!  Walking!”

Hunched into a cringe at the echoes of her shout, he looks back at her over one shoulder with an aggrieved expression.  She draws herself up and points at the sleeping boy. 

“Take _him_ to the Ninth Floating Drawing Room and lock him inside the farthest cabinet.  Then you are free to go.”

In past times, this would have provoked either caterwauling complaints or smirking mockery.  Now Flip only raises his eyebrows, gives her a long stare, then nods and turns back to the prince. 

“That’s downright cunning, Your Cuteness,” he says admiringly as he lifts Harald up by the ankles, tucking the boy’s feet between his elbows and waist.  “Won’t buy you more than a few hours, though.”

“ _I_ have the fastest capering goat in all of Slumberland,” she replies, frost in every perfectly enunciated syllable.  “How much time do you think I will need?”

“I got it, I got it, don’t listen to _me,_ I’m sure.”

He slouches up the stairs, a shady Pedrolino in a worn-out suit, grumbling theatrically and dragging Harald behind him.  Just before he rounds the corner, he raises one hand to the rim of his brown top hat and tips it towards her.

“Good luck out there, missy.”

The door to the Nightmare King’s cell is, all at once, like a dagger between her shoulder-blades, a physical weight behind her.  Fear climbs sharp-clawed up the back of her throat and suddenly she wants, more than anything she has ever wanted in her life, to run up the stairs past Flip, past the prince, past every guard and subject until she’s found her father, to throw herself into his strong arms and bury her face in his beard until the terror has passed. 

 _There’s no one laughing,_ she tells herself, but even in her mind the thought sounds dizzy, leeched bloodless and faint.  _He can’t get past the door.  Going to Father now_ will _get him past the door._

Camille presses her lips together tightly, eyes stinging, fists clenched and shaking at her sides. 

“Good luck to you too, Flip.”

 

* * *

 

She’d packed earlier, banishing the various pages, dressmakers and jewelry-men from her penthouse with firm edicts and just a touch of shouting.  Just as well, as Marine and Madam Charlotte’s voices filter in past her door, low and anxious.  Next to Bonbon, they’d always known her best, and Camille steels herself against the heartsick ache of separation. 

 _It won’t be for long,_ she tells herself, lingering at the heart of her home to take a last look around at the familiar surroundings.  _Then Father can bring in all the princes he likes without them being able to ruin everything._

She toes out of her slippers, lifts her riding boots in one hand and her suitcase in the other, and climbs back out of her room the same way she’d come in, through the passage over her bed’s headboard.  Inside, she changes out of her gown and into sturdier clothes, a dark blue skirt and jacket over a crisp shirt in antique white.  She fastens the frogs on the coat, then pulls on her boots and laces them up tightly.  The cloak, midnight blue and trimmed in soft, dark fur, goes back on above it all, and she pulls up the hood and sets off.

Twilight drapes the palace’s walks and ways as she steals towards the stables, fleeting as an air sprite.  The ballroom, visible from a raised walk as she goes, beckons to her, a beautiful golden ball humming with music and life.  She lingers but a moment before moving on, breathing a quick prayer of thanks to the castle’s spirit, the sure reason that she finds no guards or wandering guests pacing the lengths of the dim, serene halls.

The vast stables lie in the hill beneath the western wing, and here activity bustles, the grooms out en masse to receive the menagerie of beasts drawing the carriages of Slumberland’s elite.  Camille waits until a group comes by—a clutch of stablehands wrestling with camels—and plunges into their number to slip herself inside.  Chattering birdspeak and the booming tread of elephants carve out spaces for themselves in the warm musk of the air; even the grooms speak another language tonight, a jargon of numbers and letters and animal names.  She drops back from the camel group and follows them at a distance until they pass her destination—the goat pens.

Moving quickly, she opens the gate and lets herself in.  The animals inside are largely bedded down—who would hitch goats for a royal coronation, after all?—and so Camille freezes in panic when she sees the figure by the rear exit, juggling a saddle and the harness for Vidar, her fastest and favorite goat.

“Would you _please_ hold still; the princess’ll be here any minute!  Look, I even brought sugar cubes!”  The girl juts out one hip towards the white goat with his long horns and plants the saddle on his back; he takes a sniff at the pouch and turns up his nose, shuffling around in place again.

“Sugar cubes are for horses,” Camille says faintly, “Bonbon.”

Her page whirls, then winces guilty as, behind her, Camille’s best riding saddle slides to the ground with a thump.  She laces her hands together behind her back, rocking on her feet, and, as if reading Camille’s mind, has the sense to whisper.

“Right, I can’t believe I forgot!”  She conks herself on the side of the head, leaning forward to examine Camille’s travelling clothes—which she shares, if just as a red cloak thrown over her motley and a hunting horn looped from her belt.  “I knew it; I knew when we found your suitcase under the bed that you were going to sneak off!  So what’s the game; where are we going?  Why right before the party?”

“You are going back inside and keeping everyone out of my room,” Camille chides.

“Right!  For how long?”  Her page tilts her head when the princess doesn’t answer, or smile.  “Princess?”

“Just do as I say, Bonbon.”  Camille sweeps past the other girl and sets her suitcase down, hefting up the saddle instead.

“But where’re you going?  Who’s going to—”  A gasp follows, and the soft pop of a hand clapping over a gaping mouth.  The Golden Key dangles from Camille’s wrist, turning lazily and all agleam in the stable’s yellow lamplight. 

Camille crouches and fastens the saddle belt beneath her steed’s belly, tightening it with a short jerk before standing.  When she turns to face Bonbon the girl is staring at her with round, awe-filled eyes.

“Are you and the prince running away together?” she demands, somehow making a whisper sound shrill in her excitement.  “You _have_ to let me come too!  You can’t leave me behind while you play a game like that!”

“It is not a game.  It may be dangerous.”  Camille speaks with a level voice, pitch tiptoeing higher when she adds, “And I’m not ‘running away’ with anyone!”

“If it’s dangerous, that’s all the _more_ reason!  Look, I even packed!”  Bonbon twirls in place and dives for a trough, coming up with straw in her hair, a satchel in one hand and a sheathed knife in the other.  “I snuck it out of the guardhouse on my way over,” she confides with a grin.  “You know they never use this stuff anyway.”

“Bonbon—”

“ _Princess,_ ” the girl cuts her off, the title half exasperated and half pleading.  “You can’t go off alone.  Who’ll take care of you?  Anyway, you’ve never left me behind before.  The one time you did, you…”

Camille stills, a rising protest silenced on her tongue.  Bonbon stares at her feet, brows lowered, mouth downturned.  Her eyes, normally a bright royal blue, are darkened and distraught.  Camille has never seen her look this way—never, except after a prince has failed, the king is taken, and all of Slumberland mourns.  Now is far too early…

“Bonbon…” she asks, hesitant.  “Do you—remember?  Last time?”

“I don’t even know where that came from, I’m sorry.”  The page fidgets, spinning the knife in her fingers as easily as she would a baton.  “But you’ve so been weird since Harald came and…  Things aren’t _going_ right, the Professor almost fell getting out of the dirigible, and you didn’t even pick out the cookies for the present yourself.  Everything feels wrong.  Please let me come.”

Camille, fingers pressed over her heart, pulls the other girl into a fierce hug.  

“You are right,” she whispers.  “It’s all gone wrong and I will fix it, even if I’m not supposed to.  And I don’t _want_ to go alone, even though I should.”

Bonbon hugs her back and then, wrists crossed behind Camille’s waist, picks her up and spins her in a circle.

“Then take me!” she laughs in relief.  “We’ll have an adventure!”  

Camille giggles in spite of the sinking fear in her chest and dabs at her eyes.  “Very good, Bonbon.  Pack the luggage on, won’t you?”

“Right away, Your Courageous Delightfulness!”  The girl steps back and bows crisply.  Together they finish loading the goat, Camille kissing his nose and his horns while Bonbon lashes on the suitcase and slings the satchel on over her shoulder.  The princess takes the length of the reins and walks Vidar to the back door, which Bonbon opens, and the two sneak up the broad exit ramp that circles the stables.  The slope leads them upwards to the bay for the griffons, pteradons and other flying animals.

The exit is a cobalt square of starry skies set in a frame of brass halls; a lone boy sits in the corner like an ornament, eyes turned outward.  Camille climbs into the saddle, taking a deep breath as Bonbon scrambles on behind her.

“Yah!  Yah!”  She digs her heels into Vidar’s sides and leans low against the saddle, her hood hiding her face so she doesn’t have to see the stablehand’s expression as they pass.  Vidar dips into a crouch at the summit and springs out in a smooth arc, landing on a spire, a steeple, a weathermane, no point too small for purchase, and then the castle lies behind them, the night and the journey ahead.

 

* * *

 

“Camille!  Darling, it’s time to get up now!”

Camille rolls over in bed and pulls the blankets over her head before sitting up with a yawn.  She rubs at her eyes and reaches out from under her impromptu shelter to pat around on her nightstand for her brush.  It isn’t that she has a hard time getting out of bed, just that her hair is a mess and her eyes still squinting and her nightgown twisted around from her nighttime restlessness—whatever had she been dreaming of?—and she doesn’t even want to look herself in a mirror until at least the first of these is seen to.

She brushes her hair out there under her sheets, counting strokes under her breath until her voice stops scratching, smoothed out along with her red tresses.  The sunlight streaming into the room turns her hideaway into a landscape of clouds, white and billowing and still faintly scented of soap.  Her mother’s voice drifts up from the kitchen, where she sings along with the radio while making breakfast. 

“Ninety-nine, one hundred!”  Camille sighs contentedly and pushes back her covers, returning the brush to its place.  Humming, she dances a slow waltz around her room as she gets dressed: to her clothes basket, to her closet, to her vanity.  A bow of pink lipstick is the final touch, and she smiles at the girl in the mirror, pleased with the image.

“Camille?  Breakfast is ready!”

  
“Coming, Mother!”  She buckles on her shoes and hurries downstairs, into the sun-drenched kitchen, standing up on tiptoe to kiss her mother and father each on the cheek.

“You’re in a good mood today, Camille,” her father comments, turning a page in the newspaper.

She smiles sunnily.  “We’re going to the home after school today to volunteer.  We’ve been sewing the uniforms all week.  The stripes are just adorable!”

Her mother smiles indulgently.  “Well, get the day off on the right foot.  Sit down and lets have some breakfast.”

She eats in a flurry of tastes then breezes out the door with a cry of, “I must go, Mother; we’re finishing the dresses before class today,” swinging her bookbag at her side.  Her best friend is waiting at the bottom of the steps, leaning on the brick fencepost, one foot switching at the air underneath her.

“Good morning!” Camille calls, turning herself on the post and setting off down the sidewalk. 

Her friend falls in behind her, laughing.  “So where are we headed, Princess?”

“Princess?  I am flattered, but there’s no need to—”  Camille laughs, turning to look at her friend, then freezing.  A girl with no _face_ looks at her expectantly, and then a swirl of green light, scintillating like sunlight reflected on windblown leaves, moves _into_ her from behind, and the street melts away.  Suddenly there is only Bonbon, Vidar beneath her, and the endless expanses of moor around them, brilliant with wildflowers but with a gray line on the far horizon. 

Caught in a whirl of two identities, Camille blinks, her mouth opening soundlessly.  Reining in Vidar, she looks down, shaking her head violently. 

“Princess?  Are you okay?” 

“Princess,” she echos, throat dry.  “Yes.  I am Princess Camille of Slumberland, daughter of King Morpheus, born of the Rose Court and the eternal keeper of dreams of joy.”  With every title, the other Camille’s panic dwindles, finally subsiding into a tiny ball of surety sitting like a pebble in the bottom chamber of her heart. 

“Father knows we’ve gone,” she whispers. “He sent a dream.”

“Oh,” Bonbon answers, nonplussed.  “Is that bad?”

“I had been hoping not,” Camille sighs, urging Vidar forward again.  “I so wanted him to understand.”

“I’m sure you can explain it to him when we get back,” her page says, giving her an encouraging squeeze.  She adds, after Camille nods vaguely, “But maybe you could explain it to me right now?”

“Yes, I suppose we have time for that.  And you have been very patient.”

“I’ll say!”

Camille lifts one hand from Vidar’s neck, catching the Golden Key up and examining it, a succession of boys and broken promises marching across her memory.  Perhaps one couldn’t be human without breaking that promise, or perhaps it was simply too much to ask of a child. 

 _But Father should have_ learned.

“This key will open any door in Slumberland, including the most dangerous door of all—the door to the Nightmare King’s cell.  If anyone chose, they could release the Nightmare King and lay waste to our beautiful home.”  As Bonbon sucks in a breath, Camille slides her fingers back into her mount’s thick hair, half-hiding the key from view, and finishes, “Harald was going to do it.”

“No way!” her friend protests— _she really doesn’t_ _remember,_ Camille thinks.  “But we had so much fun with him yesterday!”

“I took it from him in the dungeons.”  The princess shakes her head.  “You mustn’t think he meant it to be cruel, Bonbon,” she goes on, patting the other girl’s hand as her chest swells in outrage.  “It was just curiosity, and because he’s naïve.  He isn’t the first.  Every prince before him has done the same.”

“There have been other princes?  But I don’t remember them!”

“There have been more than a dozen.  I think Father must make everyone forget them.  Perhaps he even makes himself forget.  He gets so lonely…”

“Then why doesn’t he spend more time with you?” Bonbon huffs.

Camille nudges Vidar with her heels; the goat bursts forward into his breed’s signature smooth hops.  The smudge on the horizon grows darker, sharp crags littering the distance like spilled tacks.  An image of the great rose in her gardened salon sends homesickness through her like mournful dove song.

"'The Princess of Slumberland is a flower beyond compare,'” she recites.  “I was born to the Rose Court for that purpose.  Not to be a playmate to the king.”

“Then—don’t _you_ get lonely?”

Camille laughs lightly.  “Hence the princes.  And how can I be lonely when I’ve you, Bonbon?”

The other girl hmphs with (just) suspicion but moves on, asking, “So what are we doing with the key?  Hiding it?”

“Father would find it, or send Harald to.  We are going to destroy it.”

“Wow…” Bonbon breathes.  “Where do we have to go for that?  A volcano?  A dragon lair?  A family of giants with huge hammers?”

The tacks are obviously mountains now, and the long grass falling away to thin brown reeds as the sky grows darker.  Camille gathers the reins into her hands, watching the oncoming border. 

“Nothing in Slumberland or Nightmareland will do.  There’s no such thing as an ending in either one.  We have to go farther than either of them.”  Her mouth feels numb, goosebumps rising on her arms as she speaks her destination aloud for the first time, a place learned of long, long ago from the magi that teach secrets to kings.

“We must find a dream that is ending.  A death dream.”

 

* * *

 

She wakes up in her Nightmareland prison, its walls cold beneath her temple and shoulder.  Straightening, she hugs her knees and looks around.  She sits on an ashen thumb-smudge of rock lit by a pale, sourceless illumination, a watery glow that drains the color from anything it falls on.  The walls might be black, an opaque gleaming obsidian, or they might be clear as blown glass; she can see nothing outside of them to tell her which.

Bonbon, she remembers, and the journey.  All just a dream?  Or did the Nightmare King’s minions snatch them up, for ransom or sport?  She’s wearing her cream-colored day dress and the key is gone from her wrist, leaving it thin and eggshell white.

 _Then Delroy still hasn’t come,_ she thinks, despair sitting heavy in her bones, _and everything has been a dream._ She closes her eyes and holds back a sob.  As if the hitch in her breath itself is a key, the silence folds back and she hears the others.  Flip is screaming, voice hoarse and unearthly, long since reduced to gabbled nonsense words and half-formed promises; somewhere closer the Professor is repeating "oh" over and over again, a soft noise of pain and realization.  Her father, the silence does not yield.  Perhaps he simply has not broken like the rest of them, but any sound from him would be better than the terrible absence of his presence.  Desolate, Camille lays her forehead on her knees, weeping. 

A noise ripples past her dollhouse tower cell, a deep-throated murmur of movement like the sweep of wings against a moonless sky.  A chill chases after in its wake, and she looks up—and up and up—into the ember-red eyes of the Nightmare King.  The curtain falls over her companion’s voices once more, leaving her alone.  She scrambles to her feet; captive or not, a princess of Slumberland still has her pride.

“I’m glad you stand to greet me, Princess.  Should I recognize you as well?”  The king bows like the fall of a tidal wave, a graceful, awful rush towards her where a heartbeat ago his horns had crowned the dark.  His laughter ranges out into the black vastness, echoing back from unknown boundaries warped and out of harmony. 

“Your manners are as hollow as your realm,” she snaps, trembling fingers clenching in her skirts, arms rigid at her sides.  “If you recognized my rank you would not keep my friends and I here in this dreary pit!”

“You wound me, Princess!”  He draws his massive arm, limned in ghostly blue, to his chest, rocking back.  “I keep you at the heart of my realm as my greatest treasures, the same way Morpheus kept me.”

“How dare you!  You lurk in your hollows and caves and bring nothing but fear!  You have never touched the heart of Slumberland!”

“For as long as Morpheus has been king, I’ve been at the _heart of Slumberland_.”  His voice pitches upward in an echo of her own, mocking.  “He only kept me from touching it.  And now that he’s here, there’s nothing to stop me from returning to it.  I have so longed to see it again.”

Camille’s throat burns, but cold, frightened tears streak down her face like rain.  “You’ll never find it, you beast.  You are incapable of finding your way there.”

“But why would I need to wander there, Princess, lost and bungling, when I have _you_ to show me the way?” 

One of his hands rises to cup around the wall of her prison; there are lines in his palm taller than she is, Camille sees when she whirls to face it, near faint with terror.  She clasps her hands at her chest, shoulders curving in, and forces out the words.

“Never.  I will never show you the way.” 

“You have been drowning in a nightmare for thirteen years,” the king says, words drawled out with a slow delight in cruelty.  “Little princess, you can’t return to Slumberland _without_ me.”

“What?” she hears herself whisper as the walls of her cell fracture and crack; she raises her hands and stares at nails lengthening into claws, skin mottling into a bruised yellow-green.  Her sleeves unravel and she crashes back against a shattering crystal wall, shrieking, as the threads weave back into her arms in coarse layers of fur.

Her gnarled, branching feet burst from her boots and she stumbles backwards into freefall, twisting and clawing at her back as her shoulders contort, alight with pain.  The Nightmare King laughs in cracks of thunder overhead as the very air screams around her, sheared apart by the new unfolding of her wings.

Arms wrap around her from behind and she lashes out, eyes shut, kicking and clawing, screech still echoing in her ears. 

“Princess!  Princess!  _Princess Camille!_ ” 

She hits the ground with a thump, coming back to herself all at once with Bonbon’s voice calling her name.  She doesn’t bother to get up, curling into a ball there on the hard ground, suddenly choking on the sobs that chuff raggedly in her throat and leave her with no voice but for crying.

She barely hears it as Bonbon dismounts and drops to her side.  The page gathers Camille up into her arms and rocks her tightly back and forth, clucking and cooing in dismay.

“Camille—hey, Princess, it’s okay, it’s okay..!  Shh…  You’re okay, it’s gonna be okay, Camille, it’s okay…  Oh, _please_ stop crying!” 

“Father—Father—!”  Camille clings to her companion, mind still reeling from the enormity of the dream, a cruelty she has never in all her looping decades of life imagined the King of Slumberland could bring to bear—not on even the most determined mischief-maker, much less she herself.  A proclamation?  A warning?  A disavowal?  She still feels fur crawling up her arms and darkness juddering in her heart, opening like a split sore.  Foul, foul, she feels befouled, lashed back to the long years of captivity after Delroy, the thirteenth prince’s, failure.

_Father, how could you?!  I only wanted to help!_

A large nose pushes aside her hood and snorts a breath into her ear, warm and wet.  Camille lifts one arm to slide up Vidar’s neck and turns her face into her mount’s coarse hair, shoulders still shaking from the stinging reprimand.  He bumps up against her, bringing his familiar scent—the warm, polished oak of the stables and the wild lavender of the upper valleys.  She quiets, breathing it in until her trembling stills.  Throughout, Bonbon’s hand remains, pressed at her back for support.  Finally she sniffs, drawing back and wiping at her cheeks.  Bonbon pulls an orange and yellow striped handkerchief out of one sleeve and offers it to her, looking around in wary concern; taking it, Camille dabs at her eyes and follows her companion’s glance. 

Stark gray walls tower above them on either side, jagged-edged with thin outcroppings and jutting promontories.  The stony earth is completely barren of vegetation, and clouds gather in the skies above the gorge like ill-tempered black rams in their pens, jostling and grumbling at one another.  Despite the thunderheads and the sharp walls, not even a gust of wind disturbs the air.  A stale smell lingers, intruding on the end of each breath; Camille can feel the oncoming storm pressing against her skin like—

The image of the Nightmare King’s huge hand leaves her shuddering.  She pats Bonbon’s knee and stands, brushing off her skirt.  “We should look for a path up.  If it rains, the canyon could flood.”

“I tried saying that,” her page says, hopping to her feet.  “But you were all out of it.”

“I’m sorry, Bonbon.  I didn’t mean to be rude.”  Navigation is an imprecise thing in the lands of Nod, with destinations the only truly fixed points; this is true of things as self-contained as Morpheus’s castle and as sprawlingly welcoming as Slumberland itself.  Journeys pass like half-remembered daydreams, series of places and events that serve as guideposts along the way.  Slumberland and Nightmareland are the same in this regard; for all of Flip’s claims to possess accurate maps, particular locations resemble stepping stones in a flowing brook more than set geography.  Between that and the dreams sent by the king, she has not, Camille supposes, been very good company.  “Lets see if we can find a cave that doesn’t look occupied.  I want to rest for a while.”

“Sure!  And don’t worry; if any goblins try to bother you, I’ll run ‘em right off!”  She pats the knife stuck in her belt, then offers Camille her hand.  The princess takes it and climbs back into Vidar’s saddle, tucking away the handkerchief.  Bonbon swings up behind her and they set off again, Vidar leaping from ridge to rock along the canyon’s floor and neck.

Clear-eyed again for the time being, Camille turns Bonbon’s comment over in her mind.  They should have seen goblins by now, surely.  In her travels with the princes, they inevitably attacked within minutes of a crossing into Nightmareland’s borders.  Leaping, shrieking things with no patience for subtlety or prolonged stalking, they would surely have attacked by now if they’d noticed the intruders—which can only mean they haven’t noticed yet.

 _But then, the Nightmare King has not been freed this time._ Camille glances at the key adorning her wrist for confirmation, struggling still to believe the thought after her dream.  _Perhaps things are more dormant here without him.  Slumberland is always dispirited when our king is away._

“Hey, look!”  Vidar comes to a perfectly timed stop, poised on a spit of rock the size of a dollop of whipped cream as Bonbon points down at a cleft in the wall of the gorge across from them.  “We can stop there!”

“Very good, Bonbon.  Down there, Vidar.”  Camille leans over her mount’s neck to whisper in his ear, pointing the way.  The goat snorts, head turning, and clears the gap in one smooth bound.  Bonbon clambers down and roots around in her satchel, pulling out a luminary—the frosted sphere, wrapped in threads of silver filigree, looks like one of the winter ballroom’s, an easy stock to pilfer at midsummer—and a box of matches.  Camille dismounts and follows her companion inside, leading Vidar gently by the reins.

They settle within sight of the mouth of the cave, but far back enough to avoid errant rain—the weather nymphs in Slumberland are simply petty; Camille has no desire to meet Nightmareland’s equivalent.  Menace lurks about the edges of the light’s ring, but such is the nature of the place, and she’s slept in worse.

Camille eases off her boots, then poures out a stream of grains into a shallow bowl for her goat and wedges it between two rocks so it will be easy for him to reach.  As Bonbon pulls out her swan-down comforter, the princess unpacks a small case of dishes, arranging a meat pasty at the center of a soup plate to cut it precisely into four pieces.  She sets it down by the luminary and follows it with a saucer and teacup full of chilled lilac and lemondrop tea. 

“We’ll have to share,” she apologizes.  “I only packed for one.”

“Fine by me!  Yaah!”  Bonbon sweeps down on her like a white-winged owl, folding her up in the blanket and nuzzling quick butterfly kisses in a trail up her neck, one two three four. 

Camille bats at her, giggling at the tickling brush of lips.  “Bonbon, stop it—!  I’ll spill the tea.”

The other girl cuddles up to her, subsiding amicably, and the two eat, offering the teacup to each other between bites.  When they finish, Camille sets the dishes to the side and shores back up against her friend, sighing softly and watching the little lick of candlelight dance inside the crystal globe.  She’d danced with Toulouse, the eleventh prince, in the winter ballroom, dressed in silver and white, and she’d been so happy.  Now she can’t even remember why.

_Did I forget too, once upon a time?  Is it only after Delroy that I began to remember?  After Nightmare?  Is that what Father was warning me of, that the Nightmare King is behind all of this, even locked away?  I can’t believe that—I just can’t.  Just wait, Father.  I will finish all of this._

But the nightmare still feels too real, lingering beneath her skin; she drifts between lands, unmoored and disclaimed.  _What will I do,_ she wonders, _if Father won’t take me back?  Never to return again, not a part of either realm?  Oh, it’s too awful to even think of—!_

Bonbon’s arm tightens around her shoulder; Camille looks up to find her page watching her with clouded eyes, worried. 

“What were you dreaming about, Princess?”

Camille shivers and lays her head down on the other girl’s shoulder.  “Oh, Bonbon, don’t ask me,” she sighs.  “I don’t want it to even touch you.”

“…Please?” the other girl presses after a moment’s reluctant silence.  “You said you didn’t want to go at this alone, remember?”

“And you have been with me all this way,” Camille reasons, trying to placate her.

“Have not!” she fires back.  “Every time the king sends you a dream, you’re the only one who gets it!”

“They aren’t warnings meant for you, Bonbon.” 

“Well, I wanna hear anyway!  Whatever he does to punish you, he can do to me too.”

 _I should send her home now._ Camille closes her eyes, pained.  _She doesn’t deserve this._

“Even,” she whispers, “banishment?”

Two seconds pass, and three, leaving Camille’s stomach twisting with guilt and dread, and on four she opens her mouth to tell Bonbon _you can go home, it’s all right, I’ll be—_

“Even banishment!”

She opens her eyes and stares up into Bonbon’s pale face, the other girl’s jaw and lower lip pushed out at a stubborn cant.

“You don’t have to…” Camille murmurs, stricken.

Bonbon shakes her head.  “I _want_ to,” she reiterates—and then, indefatigable, offers the princess a sunny smile.  “After all, I’m only me because—because you’re you!”

_Camille, sitting in a gazebo and looking out over the neatly trimmed palace gardens, missing her home, missing her mother, missing the sprawling arbors of pink clematis and the graceful branches of orange blossom._

_Madam Charlotte intercepting a Candy Kid who, laughing, proclaims himself to be a girl from now on in order to serve as the princess’ personal attendant.  He—she?—looks no different from the others, save that she’s swapped the usual orange shirt for a red one, which clashes with her striped tights and cone hat._

_Peeking around the edge of the lattice to look at the visitor, who waves at her with merry eyes, reminding her of her youngest siblings, themselves too young to fret overmuch about what they’ll become._

_Do you know the capital well? Camille asks.  And the uplands, and the palace?_

_I go to the shops twice a week, the Candy Kid answers.  I know all the best circuses, I’ve run messages to the centaurs and the sea sprites, and you wouldn’t_ believe _how many places guests can find to forget their gloves._

_Camille giggles, heart lifting and, over her governess’s protests, allows Bonbon to kiss her hand and lead her out into the city._

Relief teases a smile over Camille’s face.  What has she to fear from Nightmare with such true memories of home?  If the king is afraid, it is without cause; all that remains is to prove it.  She tilts her head down to Bonbon’s shoulder again, looping her arms around her knees.

“I was dreaming of Nightmareland.  I’m sorry I scared you.”

“I’m sorry you were scared,” the other girl answers promptly, sobering.  She mulls it over for a moment, head tilting, then asks slowly.  “How many times have you been to Nightmareland?”

“Thirteen,” Camille sighs, then gestures vaguely around them with one blanketed hand.  “Fourteen, now.”

“Once for each prince?”  When Camille nods confirmation, Bonbon frowns.  “Did—did the Nightmare King capture you?”

“Not always.  Mostly I came on rescue missions.”  She pauses, then admits, “But it did happen a few times.”

Bonbon’s arms thread around her waist and tug her in to lean on her friend’s chest as the page shifts facing.  “Was it—very bad?”

“Perfectly wretched,” Camille answers, unable to bring herself to say _Worse than you can imagine_ —while it’s true, there’s no point.  _No one_ can imagine without having been already.  “But the princes came, or Father fought his way free.  I’m all right now, Bonbon—but I won’t watch it happen again.  I don’t know why Father won’t learn, but it’s time that someone put a stop to it.  If Father won’t, then as Princess it’s my responsibility.”

“Why not go to one of the princes?” Bonbon asks quizzically.  Camille opens her mouth to reply, but finds herself abruptly without words.  Honestly it hadn’t even occurred to her to _tell_ Harald what was in the cell and _then_ bring him.  Maybe Flip wouldn’t have reacted the way he had if Harald had agreed to go.  Perhaps they might have convinced the Professor as well, a fitting party to break the cycle once and for all.

But, she realizes, those are only fantasies after the fact.  Even if she had thought of it, she would have taken the same route.

“I suppose…  I suppose I don’t trust the princes anymore.”

The silence that greets her words stretches out as Bonbon thinks them over.  The rain has finally begun outside, a shivering rill of sound like a handbell chorale in a minor key, or a high-pitched scream circling, disembodied, in the distant dark. 

“What were they like?” her friend asks at last.  Camille takes her turn at quiet, turning the question over in her head.

“All very different,” she decides.  “Though the same in all the ways that mattered.”

“Were any of them _special_ to you?”  Bonbon bumps their heads together, lightly teasing, muted laughter in her voice.  Camille smiles, but only a little.

“They were _all_ special, Bonbon,” she answers softly.  The candle flame flutters like her heart had once, a breath away from kissing Nemo, the first of the princes she’d thought she was coming to love and who’d gone in his time like all the rest.  “But," she finishes with low sadness, “I think they get less special every time.”

That quiets Bonbon again, the other girl squeezing her tightly.  A bead of wax wells over the edge of the white votive inside the luminary and runs slowly down its wall, glimmering like a tear.  Eyelids growing heavy, Camille draws the blanket closer around them, floating downward into a dark sleep as the candle weeps itself away.

 

* * *

 

A light humming coaxes her back into the shallows of slumber.  She turns over, fingers coming to rest on cotton-soft pillows, and breathes in the scents of morning—a fresh breeze from the opened window and clean clothes laid out on the divan; buttery orange pastries and a twist of sweet cider wafting over from—

Her hands claw into the sheets, her eyes opening wide and alighting on her wrist—her pale, unadorned wrist.  Marine looked over at her, smiling as she unfolds one of Camille’s satin mantles.  “Good morning, Princess.  I have news!  King Morpheus will be coming to see you after—Princess?”

She breaks off, for Camille has thrown back her sheets and nearly vaulted out of the bed, moving with a tight, contained fury.  The princess pulls on the gown set out for her—long sleeves, silk in periwinkle blue, the same dress she’d worn when she met Delroy; how _dare_ they?—and toes on slippers, but lingers no further, ignoring her maid’s questions and cries.

She doesn’t dare stop, for fear of the tears of frustration building in her eyes, burning and blurring her vision.  She flies down the halls and covered walks, out of her own apartment and towards her father’s rooms, pushing past servants and ignoring formalities.  A line of butlers and manservants wait outside the half-open oaken door, as well as two guards with their useless halberds.

One of them steps forward to intercept her; she stiff-arms him in the hip and keeps moving, sliding past the door and onward.  Inside, the king sits at a long writing table behind the generous servings of his own breakfast, eating and nodding as the castle’s residents deliver the morning reports.  He hasn’t changed yet, still wearing his long striped dressing gown.  The Golden Key lies on his chest; the royal scepter leans against his desk.  He looks up in surprise, then smiles fondly as she strides across the floor.

“Ah, my daughter.  Good morning!  Has someone—”

“How dare you bring me back?!”  She stops in front of his desk, a clerk scurrying to vacate the space as soon as he sees the look on her face.  “Why would you let me get all that way?!”

Morpheus’s smile drains away.  He turns to the valet standing at his shoulder and rumbles in his deep voice.  “Send the others out.” 

Camille fumes as the valet gathers up the visitors, and just as they reach the door, bursts, “Do you not wish them to know?  How they suffer every time you want a new playmate?”

The crowd at the door pauses, murmuring, but they edge out of the room when the king waves an arm in their direction.  When the door clicks shut behind them, Morpheus places his scepter on the table, lifts the piece of furniture in his massive arms, and sets it aside before turning to face her fully.

“So you have remembered,” he says, grave.

“I’ve remembered everything since the thirteenth prince failed,” she grits, “and my friends and I— _and you_ —spent _years_ imprisoned in Nightmareland.  I thought that that would finally put an end to all this, and then you brought Harald.  Father, this _has_ to stop.”

He inclines his head, looking at her with regret.  “The princes are for you, Camille.  I thought—”

“They are not!”  She stomps her foot, fists clenched.  “I am the _last_ one they meet!  You call them away to teach them lessons about being a king, and then spend the entire time playing with trains and toy soldiers.  And they betray you every time!”

He opens his mouth to speak, but she overrides him, stepping closer.  “Father, can’t you see we have responsibilities?  I am tired of watching Slumberland suffer every time a human boy gives into curiosity.  Let me destroy the key.  And then you can have all the playmates you want.”  Worse words snarl on her tongue, biting, begging to be loosed.

He bows his head, sighing through his nose into his beard.  “Camille.  We cannot risk the Golden Key falling into the wrong hands.”

She shrieks, completely involuntarily.  “The _wrong hands?_ How many pairs of _wrong hands_ must you deliver it to before you learn?!”

“Daughter—”

“I won’t stop!”  Her breath heaves in her chest, fists pressed against her sides.  “I won’t stop until you see reason.”

Still he stares at the floor, closing his eyes and drawing a breath.  “I know,” he says at last, resigned.  “You have said as much before.”

The words strike her like a blow, and she stops cold.  “What did you say?”

He sets one hand on his scepter and stands.  He towers over her, twice her height and more, and apprehension twists cold claws in her stomach.  She backs away, shaking her head. 

“You have rebelled this way before, Camille,” he says.  “After Lawrence, and Sachsev.” 

The room spins around her as she wracks her mind to remember.  The fourth prince, and the ninth.  Lawrence had been shy and polite after Nemo’s forwardness; she had not warmed to him so much.  Sachsev had also been polite, but more formal, a little prince in his way even before his coronation; the Boomps had adored him. 

She had not rebelled.  She saw them both away in the end, Lawrence to his rolling yellow cornfields and Sachsev to his river-threaded city, its summer heat warm and damp at the base of her neck.  Lawrence had looked at her with new confidence as he hopped back into his window.  Sachsev had smiled and bowed to her with a new serenity. 

She shakes her head again.  “But I remember their journeys.”  The king can make her forget, but surely he would not go this far, to create false memories.  But the grave look in his eyes says otherwise and she takes another step back as blue light begins to swirl in the gem at the scepter’s head.  “No.  Father, no!”

“I’m sorry, Camille.  Please trust that you will be happier—”

A clatter and outcry in the hallway cut off his sentence; he turns to the door just as it flies open of its own accord.  Vidar comes through in mid-leap, a green-haired rider clinging to his horns as he bounds around the room, landing on furniture and scattering tableware. 

“Bonbon!” 

“Princess!  Sorry I’m late!  Had to go to the stables first!”

The king draws himself up, chest inflating like a full wineskin.  The Golden Key lifts on the breath, and decision crystallizes in Camille’s heart.  _I will do this as many times as it takes._

She crouches and leaps forward, wildly outstretched fingers snaring the Golden Key’s cord.  As Morpheus reaches down to close one hand in the back of her dress and lift her away, she seizes the necklace in her other hand, holding on with all her strength. 

“You will both stop this instant!” the king thunders.  “Guards!” 

Vidar plunges towards him from a cabinet top and Camille gasps, breath driven out of her chest as Bonbon catches her up in one arm.  Metal flashes in the page’s other hand, the blade of a guardhouse knife slipping beneath the edge of the Golden Key’s cord, sliding along its length and severing it as gently as unravelling wool. 

Fumbling, Camille catches the key as gravity pulls it towards the floor.  “Through the rooms!” she gasps.  “His sitting room has a balcony!”

They break for the back of the room as the guards crash in the front, and the whole procession spills pell-mell through the king’s apartments, Morpheus in his flapping robe at the lead.  The scepter flashes with bright argentine light, but without the long incantation used to focus its power into a killing blaze, its magic can shape the world only gently, with the softness of a baby’s dreams of warmth.  Camille doesn’t fear it, at least as long as they keep moving. 

She reaches up to Bonbon’s shoulder and her friend sheathes the knife and helps her right herself.  “They’re still coming?” she asks.

“Right behind us,” Camille confirms. 

“We’re going to be in trouble?”

“Only if they catch us.”

Bonbon laughs giddily.  “Well, all right, then!  That’s easy!”  She urges Vidar onward with a press of her heels, doors flying open ahead of them. 

Sunlight streams over them as they break into the last room, the smell of salt reaching Camille’s nose.  She looks away from the pursuit, behind her towards the white balcony stretching along the vast length of the marble-floored room. 

“Uh, Princess…”

There should be city out there.  Instead there’s only water, an endless ocean glimmering blue and white under the sun.

 _Oh._ The realization is still and sudden in Camille’s mind.  _It was only another dream._ She glances down at her wrist, and sure enough, the Golden Key hangs there like it never left, cord intact.

“Keep going, Bonbon.”  The words tumble from her mouth as she looks back over Bonbon’s shoulder.  “Keep going, Vidar.”

The guards have vanished, even the palace, and the king— 

Morpheus stands at the center of white, swirling light, dressed in royal raiment, but empty handed.  He catches her gaze and smiles at her, tired and proud.  His lips move, but she can’t hear the words, and as Vidar mounts the balcony railing, she watches her father lift the laurel ring from his brow and whirl it away like a discus.

The last she sees of him is the expression of hope and curiosity on his face as he turns away from her and walks into the flashing silver heart of Slumberland.

They plunge into the water.

 

* * *

 

Mist hangs in the air all along the bridge, rendering the edges of its unlit black lanterns soft and indistinct.  Vidar’s footsteps make muffled noises on the hard stone road underfoot as he maneuvers around abandoned cars, their headlights dark, the seats inside all empty.  The buildings on the other side of the bridge hunker down, featureless monoliths in the gray.

Sitting behind her, Bonbon’s arms tighten around Camille’s waist.  “It’s spooky,” she whispers into the princess’s ear.  “It feels…”  She trails off, uncertain, but Camille nods understanding. 

“Alive,” she finishes.  And it does, despite the high banks of fog.  Everything around her seems to hum with an unseen energy, an electric potential along her arms.  As if just on the other side of a screen, she hears the faint sounds of traffic and the whistle of the wind blowing over and beneath the bridge.  “We’ve made it, Bonbon.”

“So we’ll be able to leave soon, right?”

That is far from a certain thing, but Camille nods anyway, stroking one of Vidar’s horns.  _I have faith in you,_ she thinks at him.  _The fastest capering goat in all the lands of Nod._

A dart of movement catches her eye and she looks up.  To her right, a scrap of purple light drifts through the air over the river, flickering and twisting like a loose lick of flame.  It stirs the fog as it floats by, the only thing Camille’s seen so far that has. 

“What is that?” Bonbon whispers in her ear.  “Look, there’s another one!”

As they continue along the bridge, another of the floating lights emerges from the fog to drift across their path, this one a bright, sunshine yellow. 

“I—I don’t know,” Camille answers, watching the little lamp drift by overhead.  She cranes her head to watch it pass, and when she turns back to the front, trees have emerged from the gloom, their leaves unmoving in the still air, but whispering on the edge of hearing.  They frame the bridge for a few yards, planted on a small peninsula of land that sprawls into the city on the left and narrows back to the river on the right; ahead, the path over water resumes. Camille hesitates, then tugs Vidar’s reins to the left.  “Go,” she whispers.

He crouches, springs up to the bridge’s mottled stone wall, and they’re off, bounding through a small park and then into the city proper.  Buildings, five and six stories and more, flash by, rows of unlit windows and flashes of gold numbers above the doors.  Other lights float through the city streets, high above or nearly underfoot.  A cool blue ribbon of fire twirls slowly by as Vidar bounces off a canopy; Camille holds onto one horn and leans out, stretching her fingers to brush them through the light.

_splashing in clear blue water, ankle-deep, sand squeezing up between his toes and little fish darting around his ankles; above, the sky stretches on and on and on until, at the horizon, it becomes one with the gentle crests of the ocean_

She blinks and looks around for another flame.  A pink one hovers beside an unattended booth on the sidewalk; she bends to her other side and caresses it with her palm.

_rings of fruit slices, circles of green kiwi and wedges of strawberry, a small hill of raspberries and blackberries, glistening orange slices forming low fences along the sides, a wall of golden crust and, beneath it all, the smell of chocolate_

_the young woman carrying it beams through mussed dark hair and sets it on their small table, brushing aside a few scraps of brightly colored paper and curls of ribbon_

“They’re memories,” Camille says aloud, looking around at the fires, floating unanchored and alone.  An echo of familiarity wells up beneath her heart, filling her with trepidation. 

“Really?”  Bonbon hops to her feet in the saddle, steadying herself with one hand on Camille’s shoulder.  When Vidar jumps again, she surges up to snatch at a light the color of new grass, then parts her legs to drop back into the saddle when he lands.  “Wow…”

Camille can feel the tug in her chest now, pulling her around like a compass arrow.  She directs Vidar down one street after another, passing through parks and plazas and over churches and domes.  An image forms in her mind with every turn: a boy, taller than her but almost as thin, tousled brown hair and uncertain eyes, a smile that appears only reluctantly, and lines of worry he’s too young for curving between his thin dark brows. 

“Look down there!”  Bonbon points, but Camille is already pulling Vidar back around towards the narrow street they just passed.  He lands neatly and trots forward, into a thin avenue between buildings. 

Inside, balcony gardens dangle trails of green over their heads, spotted with flowers whose colors the mist renders dim and pale.  The broader street lies behind them; ahead is another park, iron-wrought fences crisscrossing the view framed by the tall buildings around them.  Tall, graceful lanterns dot the walk, and beneath each one sits a bench.  Camille takes a deep breath and dismounts, approaching the nearest one. 

She already knows who the boy asleep on the wooden slats is, and though she doesn’t know _how_ he came to be here, she knows _why,_ and it’s enough to slow her steps with guilt and fear. 

Delroy doesn’t stir as she approaches, curled up close on himself, one arm tucked under his head and the other curled in against his chest.  He’s thinner than she remembers him being, but dressed in the same clothes: loose pants gone grey with repeated washing, socks with a hole in one toe, the buttoned white shirt that hangs too large on his narrow shoulders. 

“Who is he?” Bonbon whispers from a few steps behind her; she halts when Camille holds up one hand to her. 

Camille closes her eyes, clutching her hands together over her heart, responsibility bowing her shoulders forward into a defensive curve.  Almost soundless, she answers, “The thirteenth prince.” 

She lowers herself gingerly to the bench, hesitating before she reaches one hand up to brush back a lock of the prince’s dark hair.  He still looks uncertain of himself, even in sleep, and Camille sighs, a short, shaky breath that presses a dull ache against the walls of her throat. 

Delroy had been frightened by the Boomps—by many things, even in the safe wonderland of the kingdom of sweet dreams.  On their first day together in Slumberland, she’d had to coax him far more than the other princes.  It meant he’d lasted longer in the end than most—Flip must have had his work cut out for him in cajoling him into the dungeon beneath the palace—but not finding an ally in Nightmareland was a story-ending catastrophe.  Over her protests, he had sent the Boomps away; that night, when they’d been making camp, the goblins had swarmed up out of the soft earth in a horde.  The last time she saw Delroy, he’d thrown aside the scepter to dive for her hand; she’d felt his calloused fingertips close desperately around her own before she’d been pulled into the choking wet soil.

_Did the Nightmare King banish you here?  Or have you been wandering all this time?  Oh, if only I could bring you back…_

But the dream around her is his, without doubt, his own dying world, and having entered it, there will be no leaving it while it exists.  There is no power in her hands or anyone’s to unweave a dream like this. 

She can only open a door. 

“Be ready, Bonbon.  We’ll have to move very quickly once I’m done.”

“What’re you going to do?” her page asks, anxious.  Camille shakes her head with a bite of impatience, hair flipping behind her shoulders. 

“I will do my duty for this boy my kingdom wronged.”  She slides her hands around Delroy’s face, turning it gently to the sky and leans down over him, pressing her lips to his own.  In a moment, a breath stirs her bangs, a soft noise that nonetheless shocks through her every vein, and she sobs against his mouth, blinking rapidly.  His hand reaches up to pat at her cheek and his eyes blink open, foggy and confused. 

She sits up with him, her hands falling to twist in her dress.  He looks at her, then stands up and turns in place, searching the street, noting Bonbon and Vidar but not lingering on them. 

“Where—?  I’m sorry, miss.  I must have fallen asleep.”  He looks back at her, and the puzzled confusion in his eyes sends another crack through her already breaking heart.  “I’ve gotten lost, you see.  I’m trying to get home, but I can’t find anything that looks familiar at all…”

“I know,” she replies, taking his hand—though he didn’t offer it—and drawing herself to her feet.  “I’m here to show you the way.”

“Really?”  He brightens.  She blinks back her tears and nods, entwining their fingers as she takes the Golden Key into her other hand.  It glints at her touch, light gliding sinuously along the dragon’s overlapping scales.

“Come with me.” 

He nods and follows after her as she walks towards the other end of the street.  With each step, the key glows more brightly.  Ahead of them, answering the key’s power, the walls of the garden melt together and slide away, slowly at first, then faster.  The lines between the bricks blur, gates and doors flashing by in a thousand different styles and sizes.  Keeping her tread even and calm, Camille holds out the key.

As they approach, the walls’ movement changes again, circling slower and slower, like a spun wheel coming to a gradual stop.  The door that clicks into place before them is simple, even poor, white paint chipping away to faded red, the handle a pitted and discolored brass, but Delroy perks up all the same.

“You found it!  How did you know?” 

Silent, Camille turns the key in the lock before removing it and turning back to the prince.  He looks down at her, tipping his head. 

“Is everything okay?” 

She nods, letting go of his hand to unwind the Golden Key’s cord from her wrist.  “Yes, it’s fine.  But you must do me a favor, you understand?  Take this with you when you go.”

He takes the key from her when she holds it out to him, looking between her and it uncertainly.  “What’s it for?”

“It doesn’t matter.  Just take it.”  She shakes her head and reaches out to turn the door handle, cracking it open.  Warm light spills out, and the scent of baking bread, and distant laughter.  Delroy abruptly turns to face it, expression wiping open and shocked in awe.

“That’s—I think I hear my parents in there!  I have to go right away!”  He looks down at her hurriedly.  “Thank you so much, miss.  I’m sorry I can’t do m—”

Camille presses her finger to his lips.  “Shush.  You’ve done more than enough, Delroy.  Now go and be with your family.  They’ve been waiting for you to wake up for a very long time.”

He nods and gives her a last stunned smile before he turns and pushes through the door, the key he carries forgotten.  “Mama?  Papa?” she hears from within, and a shout of joy, before the door closes behind him.

She swallows roughly, but spares no time for her tears, spinning on her heel and sprinting back to Bonbon.  Already the air is growing colder, a chill wind rustling the trailing vines overhead.  The fog has begun to drain into the gutters like rainwater, and one by one, the rainbow of floating memories gutter and vanish. 

Her page helps pull her up onto her mount’s back and hands her the reins. 

“Go, Vidar!  _Go!_ ” 

The goat rears, whickering loudly, and bursts into movement.  She guides him upward, bouncing off of cars and lamp posts until he makes it to a roof, then another, up and up.  A roar building in the distance rises in her ears like the sound of the ocean inside a conch shell. 

“Oh my gumdrops,” Bonbon gulps as Camille reins Vidar in to look for the source of the sound.  The page points.  “Look at that!”

Overhead, the sky has darkened to night, but city’s fog clearing leaves a clear and cloudless expanse, a darkness glittering with diamond stars, casting the buildings below in stark monochrome.  A black line swells on the horizon, blotting out the stars as it presses inward—white-capped waves surging through the streets, pushing a jumble of cars and trees before them.  Camille swallows, the cold wind cutting her through, and looks for high ground.  She finds it in the form of a tower, four legs rising up into a latticed iron spire.  Turning Vidar towards it, they race the waves. 

 _Home_ , her heart says of the stars, and she heeds it.

“Hurry, Vidar!” she cries, leaning low in the saddle, Bonbon pressed close against her back.  “Up the tower!” 

The goat runs, leaps clipped low and short like a stone skipped over a lake ( _Reggie_ _had shown her that, she remembers_ ).  He dives from the roof of the building nearest the tower as the water crashes closer and closer, then bounds across the green lawn.  The earth itself trembles, but his hooves are sure, and in just heartbeats they’ve reached the plaza and started up.

Back and forth, back and forth, Vidar leaps in a tightening upward pattern that leaves Camille dizzy, stomach lurching with a seasick nausea.  Her grip on his horns falters as she releases a faint moan, but hands close over her own from behind and squeeze them back against the ridged curves.  Bonbon, ever the acrobat, exhorts, “I’ve got her!  Keep going, Vidar!”

The goat shifts inward, facing the tower, and begins jumping up—short, sharp measures against the cacophonic symphony gaining speed beneath them.  As he gathers himself to leap for the railing of an observation deck, the water rushes up hungrily, spraying droplets that scatter across the backs of their feet.  Even the impact on Camille’s soft leather boots drums against her, the bite of an unending winter, the shroud of an unbroken night. 

Vidar screams a protest and jumps, hitting the rail with a rough clatter, hooves scrabbling.  Above, the stars still glimmer, fixed points of perfect light.  Camille watches them closely as her steed jumps to the very top of the tower and gathers himself again.

“P-Princess?”

“Go, Vidar.  I know you can do it.”

He knows it too, and leaps.

And leaps again, and again, and Camille laughs in wild triumph as Vidar mounts the very stars, leaping from point to point, ever upward.  Bonbon joins in with a whoop seconds later.  As they climb into the sky, the two girls shout and point in every direction, at the smooth expanse of midnight blue water closing over the tower below them, and the panoply of stars around them, white and green and blue and red. 

 _I’m coming home, Father,_ Camille thinks, transcendent with joy.

And then, right behind her ear, closer even than Bonbon, a girl laughs, high and delighted.  The sound takes her heart in two hands, sinks in its fingertips, and with a pain like the world burning, tears her in two.

 

* * *

 

Weightlessness, her consciousness as frail as a scrap of paper tossed on the breeze, as thin and liable to burn away with but a spark.  She shivers, uncontrolled, unable to focus her thoughts in the darkness.

A warmth on the edge of her awareness.  Camille drifts towards it, drawn in like a child from the cold.  Beneath her, a boy— _Harald?_ she thinks, groggy and mazed—takes a hold of her hand—a different her, a her with a body and a life and a warmth apart from this tissue-thin otherworld—and walks her up the plank to the deck of a great dirigible.  The other Camille looks happy, pulling away from the boy to spin delighted circles on shining wood.

The vision floats, a globe of light suspended in a black void, but on the other side of it…  She circles around, free-floating, a cold spike screwing its way through her chest as she approaches the bed, a simple metal frame with a mattress, on which Harald sleeps, smiling and at peace. 

She looks back and forth between the boy and the dream world—the dream Camille has taken the dream Harald’s hand and begun to dance with him, both children laughing and joyful—and feels her heart seize. 

 _“No…”_ she whispers, voiceless, a bodiless wraith.  “ _No, no, no—!”_

The golden-haired boy turns over, stirring in his slumber, and she flies to him, pressing translucent hands over his closed eyes.  _“Don’t wake up!  Please don’t wake up!”_ she pleads, but she can’t hear her own words, and the edges of the darkness are receding, leaking away into the cracks and eaves of a bedroom painted in the pale glow of early dawn.  Her arms grow more transparent in the sunlight and she begins to weep, tears spilling from her eyes and vanishing as they meet Harald’s skin and pass away, through him and into the world, the real world, the solid physical Earth, not her lands of dreaming.  They are nothing but a fragment of a thought, a spark of a boy’s fantasy given cruel life, and now that life is ending as, inexorably, his mind rises to meet the morning.

_Only a dream.  All of it, only ever a dream.  No…!_

Her mother, chestnut curls and warm green eyes.  The tangle of her siblings, hair and eyes in all the shades of all the flowers in all the worlds.  Prim Madam Charlotte and smiling Marine; Morpheus, towering and dear, her poor lonely father.  Professor Genius, clumsy in his lanky frame, and dearest Bonbon, and all the rest, even mischief-minded Flip.

Flip, standing in the Nightmare King’s dungeon, his eyes strange and hard, preparing to leave, saying goodbye for a hundred years or more.  _Nothing doing, Princess.  I done my time._

_What did he mean?  Where was he going to go?_

She looks up at the vision again, wiping fruitlessly at her eyes.  The dirigible is rising into its last flight, streamers and confetti raining down upon it, and the boy and girl are scolding the thin air.  She knows the scene; she’s played it out a dozen times.  Flip should be there on his great grimy crow, and he isn’t.  Neither he nor the bird are. 

_“What?”_

She floats closer to the fading dreamworld again, peering at it from every angle, but the absence remains, a clear gap in what should be. 

_I done my time.  See you again in maybe a few hundred—_

_“Flip?”_ she whispers, but there’s no answer.  Flip has gone, passed out of the dreamlands.  Harald’s mind still has a place prepared for him, but he isn’t in it.  Independent of the dreaming boy, he…  That—that can only mean—

 _He’s real.  Flip is real._ I _am real._

 _“I am real.  Bonbon is real, my father is real, all of us are real!”_ Camille turns to face the room, away from the vision and the boy, and as she does her weight returns to her, color suffusing her arms, angry timbre flooding her voice.  “You cannot fool me anymore!”

Morpheus steps out of the last of the slithering shadows.  Cloaked and crowned, carrying the royal scepter in his right hand, he’s head to toe a king.  “This is what we are, my daughter,” he says, resolute as iron.  “This is all the purpose we serve.”

“You lie!  You _are_ a lie!”  She had watched her father change from a nightmare vision to a tired, gentle man, finally casting off the weight he’d carried for all the time she’d know him.  He had said goodbye to her, back in that last dream, though she hadn’t known it, and would never know what his last words had been.  This person, this fraud, still wears the laurel crown her father had thrown away.  The fury is enough to choke her.  “All this time, you have lied to me in my father’s shape.  Who _are_ you?”

His mouth twists up at both edges, fangs sprouting from beneath his lip as he grows like the formation of a mountain.  The ceiling cracks and dissolves as dark robes billow down, filling the world.  The Nightmare King laughs down at her again, an awful figure from all her worst memories, but the surety beats in her chest like a drum, like a wave—that this, too, is a lie. 

"Princess, I must thank you for taking the key.  Without a key, there can be no door, and so—”

“And so his cell would have become a room without a door!” she fires back.  “Stop lying to me!”

The shape changes again, spiraling down into itself and swirling with new color.  Three old women stand before her, dressed in black and red and white, the ancients who had taught her the way to the outer dreamlands. 

“We come to punish a traitor,” they say, the words passing from one mouth to another, hands working their tools, their loom and their rod and their shears, “a girl who defied her father and king, who stole the destiny of a thousand boys.”

“The magi never interfere with the rule of Slumberland, or any of the lands of Nod,”  Hands on her hips, she charges, “Reveal yourself!”

They laugh, wicked and pleased, and the woman in red hurls her bar at Camille’s face.  She ducks to the side, and when she turns back, Delroy advances on her, his haunted face twisted with ugly rage.  His outstretched hands close around her throat and he bears her down. 

“You killed me!  Your awful kingdom killed me!” 

“ _I freed him!_ You dare not defile that act!”  She wraps her hands around his wrists, glaring up at her attacker as the face shifts and flows, denying each one as it tries to settle—Antoine, Jamie, Nemo, Lawrence, each prince in turn.  “No!  No!  No!”

Finally, the face reaches Harald, and the fourteenth prince beams, off-kilter, and collapses onto his elbows over her, burying his head on her shoulder.  He slaps the ground, hands loosed from her neck, and begins to laugh, shoulders spasming with helpless mirth.  As he gasps and giggles, his hair begins to redden and smooth out, his voice’s pitch seesawing higher.  She scowls and wedges her fingers beneath his forehead, pushing his face up so she can see—

Herself.  Camille’s own face looks down at her, flushed with merriment, a giddy, sharp sparkle in her eyes.  “Oh, you should see the look on your face!” the girl sputters, folding one arm up to point at her.  “Ahahahaha!” 

Camille shoves her off, standing and backing away, and the other Camille sits folded on the ground in her dainty green dress, hands covering her mouth to catch her continuing laughter. 

“Where are Bonbon and Vidar?  Who are you?”

The other girl stands, sweeping toward her and grabbing for her hands.  Camille jerks them away and the girl circles around her, grinning.  “Haven’t you guessed it yet, Your Majesty?  Oh, we’re going to have such fun!”

“Who _are_ you?!” Camille demands, turning in place to keep their eyes met.  “Tell me!”

“You can’t make me!  That’s the best part!  You can’t make me do anything, because that’s what you’re most _afraid of!_ ”  She falls backwards, arrested again in laughter. 

“What are you saying?” Camille whispers, but the suspicion has begun to take root, dark tendrils of apprehension seeking out the paths of understanding. 

“Her Majesty, Queen Camille the Powerless!”  It isn’t even aimed at her, just fired out into the world, a punchline in search of its joke. 

“Shut up!”  The words burst out of her throat, lashed out on reflex from a place of too-raw vulnerability.  “You lie!  Tell me who you really are!” 

“You know who I am!  I was born the second you crossed Slumberland’s borders with the Golden Key!”  Her other self sweeps towards her again, too fast to dodge this time, her nails sharp on Camille’s cheeks as she clutches her face.  “Name me, Queen Camille!  You can do nothing else!”

Realization blossoms in her chest, a black rose, huge and dark, overpowering. 

“The Nightmare Queen…”

As the words fall from her lips in a whisper, the other girl arcs back, hands still locked on Camille’s face.  Her form strengthens, limbs growing longer, hair whipping free from Camille’s own demure twist.  Her dress darkens, mint green to garnet red, the splash of pink at her lips bloodying as her skin pales.  Jerking at her hands and struggling to pull away, Camille can see out of the corner of her eye the Nightmare Queen’s nails painting themselves the wet maroon of pomegranate seeds.

She’s older when she looks back, a full-grown woman, and she laughs, confident and powerful as she lifts Camille by the throat.  “Well, then,” she purrs, “shall we start this round with Nightmareland on top?”

Camille’s mind fills with a vision of an empty palace, her kingdom in mourning, with no king, no princess, no heir, and no one to come back and fix things, ever. 

_Never._

“Let go of me!  Put me down!”  She kicks and punches and claws, but the woman’s arm is too strong, an unyielding iron rod.  The Nightmare Queen whistles between the knuckles of her free hand, and something screeches out of the dark, approaching with a clamor of hooves and wheels.  A coach careens to a stop beside them, drawn by a pair of chimeras, the lions’ paws rending the ground, the goat heads coughing wisps of fire.

“Come along, little queen!” the woman laughs, tossing Camille bodily into the back of the coach, where spindly arms reach out of the lacquered wood, grasping at her limbs and clothes.  “Lets go and see what the new Nightmareland looks like.”

“Camiiiiiiille!” 

Camille’s head snaps up and she jumps, straight out the back of the moving coach, because she’s already seen the white smudge rocketing towards her, and she trusts—

Bonbon grabs her out of the air, Vidar turning even as he lands to pivot back and leap away in the other direction.  Arms wrapped around her page’s waist, Camille peers over Bonbon’s shoulder.  The Nightmare Queen’s coach is already swinging around in a wide circle, and everywhere its wheels touch, fear springs up, broken dolls and wolves and whole consortiums of goblins and devils clawing their way out of the ground.  Black bones of bare trees break the earth and contort themselves upward, branches already filled with bats even as they lay themselves open to the cloud-darkening sky.

_Nightmareland._

“Ride, Bonbon!  Faster!” 

Behind them, the Nightmare Queen laughs, pulling a whip from the air.  “Faster, Bonbon!” she echoes, mocking, and cracks the whip over her team.  “Faster!” 

“Who _is_ that?!” Bonbon asks, bewildered, holding tightly to Camille as she urges Vidar on.  The princess clings to her, watching the pursuit begin to close the distance.  Helplessness closes her throat.

_What can I do?  I don’t have the key, I don’t have the scepter, and even if I did I don’t know the incantation!  I don’t have anything!_

Her eyes fall on the saddlebag strapped to the side of Vidar’s tack, and her mind races.  _Think! **Think!** The key and the scepter were Father’s regalia and his alone.  If I’m to be queen I must make my own—but I don’t know how!  I was never supposed to _be _queen!_

She looks into the Nightmare Queen’s blue eyes, the same shade as her own.  _My eyes._ I _made this.  Morpheus was lonely, so his King captured him and took him away from everyone he cared for.  My Queen will lock me away, but it isn’t so I’ll be alone, it’s so I’ll be helpless…_

Pride kindles in her chest as tears build in her eyes.  Heart hammering, she leans precariously over the side of her mount, digging through their luggage—spare clothes, their dishes, an extra pair of shoes.  _Oh, whyever did I pack so sparingly?_

“Camille?  What are we doing?!”  Around them, the landscape fragments, clefts opening in the earth.  Vidar doges from side to side, jumping in short, dexterous arcs, but it slows them, and the Nightmare Queen’s team has taken to the sky, looming ever closer. 

“Just keep going!”  Bonbon’s horn—Camille can’t play it, and anyway it only summons the butterfly sylphs, who’d be no help here.  The knife—no, she doesn’t know how to use it, and nothing of such violent means would serve.  Camille throws open her page’s satchel, rummaging in it through party poppers, a handkerchief rope, stray cookie crumbs and loose sets of jacks.  “Oh, honestly, Bonbon!”

“I thought we were just going on a day trip!” her friend wails.  “Higher, Vidar; higher!”

“Yes, higher!” the queen calls from above them, and Bonbon yelps, “Lower, Vidar!” 

The goat’s rhythm breaks apart into the steady pounding of a full gallop, and Camille despairs.  He’s fast, he’s the fastest there is, but if all he can do is run, then they’re being run to ground, and it will be too easy to be hemmed in and cornered. 

_We’re running out of time—!_

Her hand closes on smooth glass.  She jerks it out and stares at the round luminary. 

_Yes.  That will work._

_Now what?_

Her father had been as strong as the oldest trees in the deepest forests, with a voice that could rival earthquakes.  She is a slip of a girl with nimble hands and a good—

_Yes.  Yes, that will work!_

“Hold onto me tightly, Bonbon!”  She rights herself in the saddle and closes her eyes.  As her friend’s arm locks around her waist, she hums, one note, then a second, a major third.  It must be flawless, so the key must be right—there, the G sharp.  She imagines vaulted ceilings, midwinter concerts and her voice filling every eave and corner, and wraps her hands around the luminary.  Inside it, a white mote sparks to life.  She rests her eyes on the slow dance of its movement inside the glass, then takes a breath, letting her eyes slip shut as she begins to sing. 

“ _Welcome to Slumberland, joys without number-land, rainbow’s end…_ ”

Bonbon’s breath hitches in a noise of understanding, and she holds Camille tighter, pulling out the knife with her free hand.  Vidar rears, and the princess feels him lash out with his hooves.  But she can also see the flash of blue light even through closed eyelids and feel the warmth building against her palms.  _This_ will _work._

“ _Welcome to dreamy times, starbeams and valentines, where everyone is a friend._ ”  As her voice glides up to the end of the line, she hears the queen shriek her indignance overhead, and the scream of wind as her coach dives towards them.  A half-dozen verses collide in Camille’s head; for an awful, yawning second, she can’t decide—

“Sing the miracles part!” Bonbon hisses, stretching her arm out to slash at an unseen foe, and Camille’s tongue takes over.

“ _Miracles never imagined await you behind every door._ ” 

“Morpheus is _dead!_ When your kingdom asks where the king and his beloved heir have gone, what sort of _lie_ will you tell them, and how will it be different from all your father’s lies?!”

Camille gasps a shaking breath, opening her eyes to stare at the glittering sphere in her hands.  Her father’s winter-blue power dispersed, her own magic shines with the heat of summer, a white-gold haze swept through by sparks in pink and green.  Pain belies the beauty, the metal searing her fingers where they touch, but she holds it tighter, singing out over the Nightmare Queen’s words.

“ _Til morning is brightening—”_ she lifts the orb overhead, her senses expanding and expanding _“—the journey delighting—_

“ _—will call to you._ ”

The queen screams, a moment’s sensation quickly lost to Camille as her power reaches a zenith point, flashes, and opens all the lands of Nod to her inner gaze.

_—a warm infinity touched by neither language nor light that no one born will ever enter again_

_—the kingdom of dreams, pleasures and raptures, and that of nightmares, terrors and pressures_

_—mundane dreams of awakening with their lurking sprites and imps, the wild neutral lands freighted with destiny, waiting to be shaped by visiting dreamers, and all the space between_

_—the eternally shifting borderlands, worlds forming and dissolving, each dream created and seen by one human dreamer alone as they linger in the doorway between life and death_

She falls to her knees as the power shuts off, staring down dazedly at her burned hands.  The sphere resting in her burned palms glows gently, transformed from a white and silver candle holder to a hollow gold ball, the metal crafted to resemble an intricate tangle of vines.  A half-opened rose blossom crowns it with pink and green jade.  Wisps of the warm haze of light still circle it, draining through the vines back into the orb’s heart, taking the pain from her hands as they go. 

Something _clunks_ to the ground nearby and Camille looks up—and goes on looking as, beyond the small box lying upside-down next to her, Bonbon lowers her arms.  She’s gotten taller, and her Candy Kid motley has changed, the orange and yellow stripes in her tights now diamonds, her red shirt with its pompoms now a longer-sleeved coat with a long row of round buttons down the front.  A short maroon cape is pinned off-center over her shoulders, the hem tipped up at the back by the end of the rapier sheathed at her hip where she’d been wearing the knife before. 

She stares back at Camille, and both of them open their mouths to speak.  Before either forms words, though, Vidar butts Camille’s back, bleating in a tone that’s clearly plaintive despite the new lower pitch.

“Oh, look at you!” she marvels, turning and looking up at her mount’s higher head and shaggier hair, the great circling curve of his horns.  “It must confuse you, but you look _very_ handsome.”  She strokes his nose and he _baas_ , mollified.

“Um.  Your Fantastic Older-Looking Scrumptiousness?”  Camille blinks and turns back to look at Bonbon.  “What just happened?”  Her page stares at her for another few seconds, then ventures, shoulders hunching, “Did she mean it?  About King Morpheus?”

Camille looks down at her lap, hands folding and unfolding—her dress is different, she notices, scalloped layers of overlapping pink and gold, and her hands are longer and more refined.  _Will they be as strong as the queen’s?_ she wonders, and takes a breath to steady herself.  _They_ are _the queen’s, so they will have to be._

She stands up.  “The people of Slumberland don’t die.  But he has passed on.  Oh, Bonbon,” she finishes as tears fill the other girl’s eyes, “it’s all right.  He was happy at the end.  And I’m not going anywhere.”

Her friend wipes her nose with the back of her arm, sniffling.  “I’m gonna miss him!”

Camille sweeps her into a hug, pressing against her chest.  “Me too,” she whispers, letting her own tears rise, relief and grief in warring measure.  “Oh!  Thank you for coming with me!” 

Bonbon’s arms wrap around her in a bear hug, almost lifting her off her feet, and the other girl nods, the gesture sure even if her voice is watery.  “You bet.”

Camille holds onto her for a few minutes, until Vidar breaks the interlude by moving away, bowing his head to the grass.  And it _is_ grass, she realizes, sparse but green.  She slides her hand around Bonbon’s and pulls away from her companion so she can finally look around properly. 

The three of them are standing in a wide plain, white clouds rolling overhead, the charcoal smudge on the distant horizon all that’s visible of Nightmareland.  In the other direction, far closer, orange and white roofs crown the rising hills, colorful against the green cottonball fluff of the Crystal Cloud beyond them.  Nearly home, now, and who knows what she’ll find?

Bonbon gives her eyes a last good scrubbing, squeezing Camille’s hand before she lets it go and blows out a short breath, patting her cheeks.  “Is Harald still going to be there?”

“I don’t know.”  Camille considers.  “I think…  Father must have suspected what was going to happen once he found out I’d left.  Maybe he sent him home, or left him a message for—” 

She breaks off, eyes falling to the box that had landed beside her earlier.  _Could it be?_ There in two steps, she kneels and picks it up.  Small and silver, like any one of Camille’s dozen ring boxes at home, it looks old, the metal tarnished and scarred.  A clasp slung through a protruding, bent eyelet hooks it closed.  She turns it over—and drops it again instantly.  It lands right-side up this time, the emblem on its lid exposed to the sky: the same self-devouring dragon that had formed the head of the Golden Key.

“Princess?  I mean, Queen?  Your Majesty?  Camille?”  Bonbon crouches down next to her, following her gaze.  “…Oh.  That’s—that’s bad.”

 _No matter what Father told them, no one can destroy the Nightmare, just seal it up,_ Camille thinks, staring at the box with dry-throated dread. 

“She’s…?”

Camille nods to Bonbon’s half-asked question.

“But why isn’t it a key?”  When the other girl doesn’t answer, Bonbon looks over at her.  “Camille?  …Do you want me to hold onto it?”  Camille nods, a shaken quarter-inch dip of her chin, and Bonbon reaches down to pick up the box.

_What?  No—!_

Camille lashes out, seizing Bonbon’s wrist.  When the other girl looks at her, baffled, she shakes her head.  “No.  I’ll carry it, Bonbon.  Just—get me the plate, would you?  Please?” she adds when her page doesn’t get up. 

“Well, okay…”  Bonbon hops up to her feet and walks after Vidar, stealing glances back at the young queen.

 _I almost let her.  I can’t believe I almost let her._ Camille pulls out a handkerchief—orange and yellow again, the one Bonbon had lent her before—and uses it to pick up the box again, tracing the dragon on the lid.  _Queen Camille the Powerless!_ The memory lashes at her and she flinches, her fingers trembling on the latch. 

_No one can carry this weight for me.  If I let someone now it will never stop.  So it must simply never start._

She forces her fingers away from the clasp and folds the box up into the cloth, tucking it into her pocket where it sits like a heavy stone.  Bonbon comes back over with the plate; Camille takes it and turns its back to the light, examining the shape of her reflection. 

She does look older, a young woman rather than a child, the roundness of her cheeks smoothed into longer lines in her cheek and jaw.  Her hair is pinned in a twist along the side of her head, decorated with tiny white rosettes, her old fringe of bangs grown into long locks which frame her face with gentle curls.  The queen in the reflection looks composed and still, and frowns as Camille frowns.  _Too_ composed, she thinks, and hands the plate back to Bonbon.

“Hold it for me?” she asks, and when the other girl complies, straightens her back and sets to pulling the pins from her hair, finger-combing it down in waves over her shoulders and bare collarbone.  She gathers it back in a low ponytail; tries braiding it to one side in a long plait; turns her head and examines it in a state of freeflowing waves.  Finally she pulls back a center portion and pins it up in a small bun, leaving the rest free.  There.  Just enough to look composed, but still carefree.  She smiles, first at herself, then at Bonbon, heart lightening.

Her friend spins the plate on one finger and offers Camille her other hand, pulling the young queen to her feet.  Grinning, she ducks in and sneaks a kiss to Camille’s cheek, sticking her tongue out afterwards when Camille blinks and touches the spot.  “I wanted to beat the rush at coronation.  You’re going to be queen now, right?”

Warmth unfurls through Camille and she squeezes Bonbon’s hand in both of hers, nodding.  Her friend laughs, spinning her around in a broad circle. 

"Well, what are we waiting for?  Lets go home already!”

“Yes.  At last.” 

The two of them mount up on Vidar again, and Camille kisses the top of his head.  “Home, Vidar,” she breathes.  He bumps his head up against hers, setting off towards Slumberland’s bright gables, and she laughs gaily, Bonbon cheering at her back. 

And if the box in her pocket is still heavy, well, Bonbon’s arms around her are still warm, and the country they race towards is still beautiful.

And she is still Camille, and now at last her story is in her own hands.


End file.
